LECTURE I NOTE G.—P. 16.

ORIGIN OF THE OLD TESTAMENT VIEW—RELATION TO CRITICAL THEORIES.

Many feel that from the peculiarity of Israel’s religion referred
to in last note the need will arise sooner or later for recasting the whole critical
view of the development. The more rich and wonderful the religious development of
the age of the prophets is shown to be, the more will it be felt necessary to postulate
something in the earlier stages to account for this development—the more natural
and life-like will Israel’s own account of its history appear869869Cf. Robertson’s Early Religion
of Israel (Baird Lectures). An able criticism of some of Professor R. Smith’s
positions in The Religion of the Semites appeared in the Edinburgh Review,
April 1892.—the
more impossible will it be found to explain the presence of such a development of
religion at all apart from the fact of supernatural Revelation.

As it is, there is a growing acknowledgment among the critics of the most advanced
school, that, date the books when we may, the religion can only be explained by
Revelation. I quote from three recent works.

379

H. Schultz, in his new edition of his Alttestamentliche Theologie, 1889,
thus writes: “The Old Testament religion is thus only to be explained out of Revelation;
that is to say, out of the fact that God raised up to this people men, in whose
original religious and moral endowment, developed through the leadings of their
inner and outer life, the receptivity was given for an absolutely original comprehension
of the self-communicating, redeeming will of God towards men, the religious truth
which makes free—not as a result of human wisdom or intellectual effort, but as
an irresistible, constraining power on the soul itself. Only he who explicitly recognises
this can do historical justice to the Old Testament” (p. 50).

R. Kittel, in his recent valuable Geschichte der Hebräer, 1888–92, also
based, though discriminatingly, on the results of the later criticism, thus sums
up on the question: “Whence did Moses derive his knowledge of God?” “The historian
stands here,” he says, “before a mystery, which is almost unique in history. A solution
is only to be found if in that gap a factor is inserted, the legitimacy of which
can no more be proved by strict historical methods. There are points in the life
of humanity where history goes over into the philosophy of history, and speculation
must illuminate with its retrospective and interpreting light the otherwise permanently
dark course of the historical process. Such a case is here. Only an immediate
contact of God Himself with man can produce the true knowledge of God, or bring
man a real stage nearer to it. For in himself man finds only the world, and his
own proper ego. Neither one nor the other yields more than heathenism: the
former a lower, the latter a higher form of it. Does the thought flash on Moses
that God is neither the world nor the idealised image of man, but that He is the
Lord of Life, of moral commands, exalted above multiplicity and the world of sense,
and the Creator, who does not crush man, but ennobles him; so has he this knowledge,
not out of his time, and not out of himself—he has it out of an immediate Revelation
of this God in his heart.”—Geschichte, i. pp. 227, 228.

Alex. Westphal, author of an able French work, Les Sources
du Pentateuque, Etude de Critique et d’Histoire, 1888–92, is another writer
who uncompromisingly accepts the results of the advanced critical school. But he
earnestly repudiates, in the Preface to the above work, the idea that these results
destroy, and do not rather confirm, faith in Revelation, and even builds on them
an argument for the historic truthfulness of the early tradition. He separates himself
in this respect from the unbelieving position. “Truth to tell,” he says, “the unanimity
of scholars exists only in relation to one of the solutions demanded, that of the
literary problem....The position which the scholar takes up towards the books which
lie studies, and his personal views on the history and the religious development
of Israel, always exercise, whether he wishes it or not a considerable influence
on the results of his work. However, we may be permitted to affirm, and hope one
day to be able to prove, that the reply to the historic question belongs to evangelical
criticism, which, illuminated by the spirit of Revelation, alone possesses all the
380factors for the solution of this grave problem. . . . Far from
being dismayed by the fact that the plurality of sources involves profound modifications
in our traditional notion of the Pentateuch written by Moses, we should rather see
in it a providential intervention, at the moment when it is most necessary, a decisive
argument in favour of the primitive history.”—Les Sources, i. Preface, p.
28.

869Cf. Robertson’s Early Religion
of Israel (Baird Lectures). An able criticism of some of Professor R. Smith’s
positions in The Religion of the Semites appeared in the Edinburgh Review,
April 1892.